We should just move away from null-terminated strings, where we can, as fast as we can.
Which of course causes issues when languages with more proper strings interact with C but there you go.
Ideally, the standard would include a type that packages a string with its length, and had functions that used that type and/or took the length as an argument. But even without that it is possible avoid using null terminated strings in a lot of places.
Simple things aren’t simple - want to append a formatted string to an existing buffer? Good luck! Now do it with UTF-8!
I truly feel the standard library design did more disservice to C than the language definition itself.
Just an agreed ABI for slices would be enough that language A's growable array type (Rust's Vec, C++ std::vector, but equally the ArrayList or some languages even call this just "list") of say 32-bit signed integers can give a (read only) reference to language B to look at all these 32-bit signed integers without language's A and B having to agree how growable arrays work at all. In C today you have to go wrestle with the ABI pig for much less.
Is is an issue of "more proper strings" or just languages trying to have their cake and eat it too? have their sense of a string and C interoperability. I think this is were we see the strength of Zig, it's strings are designed around and extend the C idea of string instead of just saying our way is better and we are just going to blame C for any friction.
My standard disclaimer comes into play here, I am not a programmer and very much a humanities sort, I could be completely missing what is obvious. Just trying to understand better.
Edit: That was not quite right, Zig has its string literal for C compatibility. There is something I am missing here in my understanding of strings in the broader sense.
And maybe even have a (arch dependent) string buffer zone where the actual memory length is a multiple of 4 or even 8